>Thanks Sergey. I tried your query, but it still seems to bring up the running query box on screen and seems to take same amount (status bar indicates 1 record in 5.41 seconds) of time as the query I designed. I have my indexes in table, and I thought it might be the ORDER BY clause that may be causing slow query, but apparently not.
>
>thank you
>Nick Patel

If select solution is too slow you can always use procedural code

SELECT payroll_tbl
SET ORDER TO ID DESC
SCAN WHILE unemp_ins_pct = 0
	* SKIP records with 0 
ENDSCAN
.q1 = unemp_ins_pct